Photography section: Wallpapers, Tips and Tests

"The next time you pick up a camera think of it not as an inflexible and automatic robot, but as a flexible instrument which you must understand to properly use. An electronic and optical miracle creates nothing on its own ! Whatever beauty and excitement it can represent exist in your mind and spirit to begin with." — Ansel Adams, January 1980.

On two pages I gathered all the horizontal and Vertical panoramic pictures that you can see around my site, up to a certain date. After that there were just too many, so the most recent are here and here. I have written a program that 'warps' pictures in order to transform them into panorama. It's freeware and here's a tutorial for it.

And here's a list of posters, mostly B&W and panoramic, currently on sale in a store in Briançon. I'm not selling them online but you are certainly welcome to take a look at them.

If you want to use or purchase some of my pictures, first make sure they are not placed in a photographic agency, in which case you should contact them, not me.

For a list of pictures available for sale, take a look at the five royalty-free photo archive CDs I sell, featuring between 250 and 390 pictures of Antarctica, penguins, climbing in the Alps, in the USA and many other places. Price is below 50¢ per image.

My old interest in photography has been rekindled in 2000 by the loss of most of my photographic equipment in the infamous car accident that finished off our honeymoon. I could have decided to delay indefinitely the acquisition of a new camera, instead I bought two ! A Nikon F100 and a Ricoh GR21. More recently I started late on the digital wave with the Ricoh GRD and the Fuji S5 pro.

On that same page you'll find some comments about other photographic gear that passed through my hands but the recent digital compact cameras are on their own.

As you may have noticed from the rest of my site, I'm pretty much into climbing, so I have put up some information about taking pictures while climbing and how I prepared the pictures for this site.

Besides climbing, there are also some images of base jumping and some images I found while climbing.

Fisheye

I've had some fun with a fisheye lens and was surprised by the many different things you can do with it. So I wrote a program to turn the resulting round images into fake rectilinear images or half-spherical panoramas, a variant of which can generate funky 360° fisheye images. They can even be printed on paper as philosphere polyhedra.